I wanted to get on that old bus and let it bounce everything to pieces. Shake things back to normal again. I did not want to have to remember Bunna. But I didn’t want to worry about forgetting him, either.
I was carrying my diary in my lap like an old assignment book with an assignment I couldn’t let go of. I wanted to read and reread every word I’d ever written about Bunna. As I leafed though the book, the fi rst words I ever wrote about him jumped off the page:
BUNNA A IS A DUMB ANIMAL!!
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I was so mad when I wrote it that I pressed really hard and made little ridges on the paper. Now the words stand out on that page like Braille.
How can that be? Th
at’s what I want to know. Th
ose words
are still alive, but Bunna’s dead. How can a dumb old piece of paper with a girl’s silly writing outlive a boy with chocolatey brown eyes and a smile to die for?
It seemed like I was the only one on that whole bus thinking about Bunna. Everyone else was too excited about the new bus. Bunna’s bus! Part of me wanted to scream it out, and part of me wanted to hoard his memory to myself and totally ignore the bus. And another part wanted to blame the bus for everything, which didn’t make any sense at all.
We drove into the school grounds in full glory, Father honking the horn like he was the leader of a one-horned band.
Before we had even properly stopped, Amiq, who had spent the summer working in Fairbanks, jumped off , Eskimo dancing—stomping his foot and waving one arm at that big expanse of shiny new bus like he’d just invented it and had made up a brand-new dance to tell the story.
Th
e whole world could fall apart, and some things, like Amiq, would never ever change. Th
at made me feel better and
worse, both at the same time.
I could see Donna, Sonny, and the nuns standing by the door to the school, watching Amiq dance his bus dance. By this time Sister Mary Kate was so excited, she was practically dancing herself. I could hear her yelling right through the 170
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H E ’ S M Y B R O T H E R / C h i c k i e window of the bus. “Will you just look at that! It’s a miracle, a complete miracle!”
You probably could have heard her yelling all the way to Fairbanks. Th
at’s how excited she was. She turned to Sister
Sarah and hollered even louder, on account of Sister’s hearing,
“IT IS A MIRACLE, ISN’T IT, SISTER?”
Sister Sarah just scowled. She didn’t like all the racket any more than I did, but Father Flanagan kept right on honking, and the kids kept leaping off the bus with big smiles like they were rock stars on tour or something. I guess I should have been glad about the fact that Father Mullen wasn’t there to spread doom and gloom, like he always did. But I wasn’t. I didn’t care about any of it.
By the time it was my turn to climb down those new stairs, it felt like the din had turned my insides to mush and made my knees get as wobbly as day-old noodles. All I wanted to do was disappear.
Th
at’s when I saw Luke. He was standing way off to the side, like he wanted to disappear, too. When I looked at him, it felt like everyone else just melted away, and it was just us two, all alone, missing Bunna, together. I could tell, right then and there, that he knew about me and Bunna and how we’d kissed on the edge of the endless woods. I don’t know how he knew, but he did. I guess that’s how brothers are sometimes.
I don’t know if I imagined it or not, the sudden silence that came right then. My ears rang with it.
Luke took one little step toward me. It was a tentative 171
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sort of step, like he was trying to remember how to walk.
And before I could even think about what I was doing, I dropped my duffl
e and started running toward him, sobbing
and sobbing until there weren’t any tears left inside me. Luke was crying, too, only you wouldn’t have hardly been able to tell it. He just stood there, as rooted as a tree, tears running down his cheeks like they’d always been there. Like he’d been born in tears. Th
en he wiped his face with the sleeve of
his shirt, grabbed my duffl
e, and we walked into the school
together.
We didn’t try to make our steps match, but they did match, perfectly. When we reached the door and I turned around to look back at the bus, I realized that all the others were just standing there, watching us. Most of the girls were crying, too, and Sister Mary Kate held her hand to her chest.
Th
at big bus just sat there behind
